Forums » Crafting and Gathering

Crafter's Roundtable: Tack and Harness

    • 1785 posts
    April 4, 2019 8:31 AM PDT

    This week's crafter's roundtable is all about mounts, with a side of travel! Just like always, the point of this discussion is to get people talking, so there's no wrong answers here. To help spur the discussion, we've gone ahead and rounded up some responses from the Pantheon Crafters staff here.

    The Question:

    Recently there's been a discussion about travel time and mounts here on the forums. Lots of really good ideas and opinions have been put forth about how mounts could potentially be implemented in Pantheon, or whether they should.

    Our question though is this: If mounts are implemented in Pantheon, how do you see the game's crafting and gathering system interacting with them? Should the systems be completely separate, or should crafters and gatherers be generating supplies that are related to mounts and travel in the game? And if so, how far should things go?

    As a bonus question (and yes, this is a new thing we're doing each time now), how often do you feel that crafters should have to travel in-game (as part of crafting)? Should it be a regular occurrence, or only occasionally?


    Here's what the website staff had to say on the topic. Give it a read, and then tell us your own thoughts in a reply!

    Autherial said:

    On the premise that horses are in game, I would like to be able to craft saddles barding stirrups horse shoes etc. With all the expected stats, speed turning radius etc. I think traveling for crafter's would be fun. For me it helps the role play aspect of the profession. Traveling to Nephele's shop to pick up some Elven Steel so I can make some swords , then off to Crommulent for the leather to craft the hilt and sling.


    Khaleesi said:

    @Autherial , the stat bonuses to craft saddlery and horseshoes, whips and harnesses would be a great addition to both the crafting community and all who need to travel.

    I'm looking forward to traveling being an essential part of advancing one's career and proficiency at their chosen trade. Certainly, if you want to work metal in the old Dwarven methods, you better be ready to travel and seek an apprenticeship with the Old Masters.

    Gathering is another aspect entirely. We have had some discussion in the past about the potential for work horses and donkeys, possibly with carts. A salvager and gatherer what you want to have the saddlebag room to store for each Goods and possibly a cart to haul back wood.

    If we get to travel to inns to supply goods, furnishings, and maintenance materials, then a donkey and cart may take longer than walking, but would be more efficient in the long run.

    Who knows, maybe a passerby will need something that we packed along and be willing to pay a little more for the convenience.


    Trasak said:

    I am going to come at this from a slightly different direction, I know big surprise right?

    Mounts, vehicles, movement speed, encumbrance, bag space, item slot size and item weight could all combine into a very interesting system with how it affects trade skills and harvesting.

    If VR is unwilling/uninterested in switching to a volume based inventory rather than a slot based inventory then I hope that they still take the time to assign items a reasonable item size and have it affect bag types. The items could be tiny (1 cubic centimeter), small (16 cm^3, 4 cm side), medium (256 cm^3, 16 cm side [~6” cube]), large (4096 cm^3, 64 cm side [~2ft box]), giant (16777216 cm^3, 16.8 cubic meters, 2.56 meter side [~8ft box])

    The idea is that up to 16 objects of once size can fit in the slot once size larger. Smaller bags will then be able to fit inside of larger bags to give you these expanded slots but until you have the smaller bags your items still take up the slots. There could also be bags two sizes larger than the objects that can go into it with up to 256 item slots that are organize-able. I should also say that the 16:1 ratio is the top quality bags with no weight reduction. Weight reduction enchantments reduce the space inside the bag as do lower quality bag construction materials and techniques with the worst ratio being 4:1.

    Two more key points will be required to make this work. First is nothing stacks, ever. An item is an item and always will be though most formerly stacking items will be tiny items of negligible weight. Next is that the players inventory is 8 large sized slots that cannot contain bags with anything in them and one primary backpack slot that can equip a large sized container. Special note that there may be magical backpacks that have large slots in them rather than just medium slots.

    Now to the actual question, if the above system is put into place then players will be very limited on the number of large items they can move in their own inventory and will be incapable of moving giant items on their own. What mounts could add in addition to movement speed is both more large size inventory slots with possible bag slots as well as added carrying capacity. This way a wizard with super low strength could still go mine. Vehicles could take this one step further and allow the loading and transport of giant items and a large number of large items but they would also be as slow as player walking speed.

    Harvesting of minerals and lumber would both involve collecting large numbers of large items with relatively high weights as well as the occasional giant item. When going out to harvest you will need to have some way to bring the ore back to the smelter or logs to the saw mill. If/when housing and ship building become a thing in Pantheon then delivery of furniture and large prefabricated building materials will require a heavy wagon to move the objects from the workshops to the desired locations.

    Additionally if a player has bought many large storage slots in a local bank and they want to move everything to a different location then they will need to pay to have it moved by NPCs or rent a wagon and drive it themselves. There could be an entire style of play based on running these caravans from one place to another.

    All players, mounts and vehicles will have light, medium, heavy and maximum encumbrances. Maximum movement speed will be restricted any time anything is over light encumbrance. This means you could get to a location magically faster if you have little in your inventory but once loaded up the magic will cease to work and you will be restricted to natural movement speeds. This will limit the influx of a massive amount of raw materials which will also support a time intensive rather than quantity of material intensive crafting process.

    This also can add an interesting PVE component to harvesting as mounts and vehicles could have set HP values and if killed/destroyed will drop everything on the ground and they could not be unsummoned if they have anything in their inventory.

    Lastly I would like to see the detection range of harvestable materials, and possibly all perception flags, be inversely proportional to your current speed. For reference at your natural walking speed of 3 mph your perception range might be as far as 50ft but on a horse sprinting at 50 mph your detection range is basically turned off unless you touch it. I think this will do a lot to support the journey not the destination concept of Pantheon.


    Nephele said:

    So, starting with mounts - at a basic level, I would like to see crafters able to craft equipment for mounts much like @Autherial suggested. Saddles, saddlebags, horseshoes, barding, feed bags, etc. I also somewhat agree with @Trasak that mounts should be useful for more than simply getting from place to place faster. If travel and encumbrance are meaningful enough, I absolutely love the idea of having to do something like drive a wagon from place to place when you need to move a lot of stuff! That would be very cool to see if it could be implemented well.

    I feel like crafters should absolutely play a role in terms of outfitting and equipping these mounts/vehicles (and building the vehicles). At launch, that might just be simple horses and pack mules. Longer-term though, I'd love to see carts and wagons, boats and ships. - and I'd love to see those be collaborative crafting projects, similar to how ships in Vanguard were constructed. Imagine, if you will, working with your guild to build a new outpost somewhere out in the world. It's relatively far from any nearby city, so your first step (once you've secured the land) is to build a few wagons or ships to transport all the materials for the guild hall to the site. Then you can load up those wagons or ships with the bricks, planks, nails, and so on that you need, and transport them out there to get started. When we talk about housing and player cities that we hope to see in Pantheon post-launch, part of that experience that I envision is the idea of people loading up covered wagons and heading out into the frontier to build a new home. I think if it could be done well and in a way that fits in with the rest of the world, that would really help turn housing from just being a convenience into being an additional sphere of gameplay. And to bring it full circle, that would also enable players to do things like set up ranches and actually breed and train mounts for other players. I'll caveat though that a lot of that feels like an expansion feature set to me - and probably for launch, we should temper our expectations a bit.

    As for travel, it's no secret that I really believe that travel should be required for crafters. Whether that's heading out to gather resources, or moving from place to place to ply your trade, or even finding that reclusive master to teach you advanced techniques, or piecing together fragments of ancient texts to learn secret recipes, travel should be just as important to crafters as it is to adventurers in my opinion. And how better to travel than on your trusty steed?


    Now let's hear from everyone else! Saddle up and tell us how you think crafting, mounts, and travel should interact in Pantheon!

    • 193 posts
    April 4, 2019 9:34 AM PDT

    Nephele said:


    The Question:

    Recently there's been a discussion about travel time and mounts here on the forums. Lots of really good ideas and opinions have been put forth about how mounts could potentially be implemented in Pantheon, or whether they should.

    Our question though is this: If mounts are implemented in Pantheon, how do you see the game's crafting and gathering system interacting with them? Should the systems be completely separate, or should crafters and gatherers be generating supplies that are related to mounts and travel in the game? And if so, how far should things go?

    I think how far things should go will depend on time and interest of the community and the devs who will have to code it. Ideally, I'd like to see a separate trade for the mounts themselves that would involve the others - woodworkers making fences, barns, troughs, etc., leatherworkers/outfitters making saddles, bridles, tailors making saddle blankets, provisioners (or possibly the rancher) combining/growing food, smiths making a well pump. The rancher would be responsible for breeding, feeding, training and ultimately selling the mounts. You could start with a basic skill of 'catch' to start your farm, having to get male and female versions of whatever critter would make a good mount. Then you'd need to domesticate and breed them to get rolling.

    As a bonus question (and yes, this is a new thing we're doing each time now), how often do you feel that crafters should have to travel in-game (as part of crafting)? Should it be a regular occurrence, or only occasionally?

    I think crafters should have to gather almost everything they need for their recipes, and the frequency, I suppose, would depend on available carrying and storing capacities. One thing I don't want to see is being able to harvest or gather while mounted. That just seemed so wrong in other games I've played.

    Really like the idea of wagons, carts, packmules, etc. It might be good to make those things attackable (much like the outpost Aradune was talking about in the housing thread), encouraging you to have a friend or two to help protect your harvest.

    • 2419 posts
    April 4, 2019 9:40 AM PDT

    Nephele said:

    The Question:
     If mounts are implemented in Pantheon, how do you see the game's crafting and gathering system interacting with them? Should the systems be completely separate, or should crafters and gatherers be generating supplies that are related to mounts and travel in the game? And if so, how far should things go?

    As a bonus question (and yes, this is a new thing we're doing each time now), how often do you feel that crafters should have to travel in-game (as part of crafting)? Should it be a regular occurrence, or only occasionally?

    If there are to be mounts, they should need the same barding/tack that a real mount would need.  Shoes, Harness, Reins, Saddle, Saddlebags, Saddle Blanket.  A leatherworker could provide all but the shoes.  Those would come from a blacksmith.  There could be various sizes of saddle bags and quality of kit so you can not only expand your storage capacity as you become more wealthy but also increase the visuals of your mount to be more elaborate.

    I remember a discussion years ago about VR's thoughts on mounts:  They were to be mostly about storage.  You would take your horse, mule, whatever, with you to an area, park it outside a dungeon or near your camp and after your adventuring is done for the day you load up your horse with your booty.  That way you would not need to revist a town quite so often.  The mounts wouldn't be attacked by NPCs and other players couldn't take them nor access their storage.

    As for crafters traveling?  They should need to do it as often as adventures need to travel.  Learning the basics of a skill in your starting town is fine, but beyond that you must go out into the world to not only gather materials but in many cases to then craft those materials.  If it were up to me, there would be special crafting stations out in the world, magical/mystical ones imbued with properties needed to craft some of the highest/best items.  To forge that chestplate made of star ore and mithril would mean you need to go into the depth of this lava goblin fortress carved out of the side of a volcano to use the forge whose bellow are worked by fire trolls.  Only in that forge can the metal be heated high enough.  Oh, and to use that forge you first need to be on friendly terms with the goblins.

    • 2138 posts
    April 4, 2019 11:59 AM PDT

    I imagine it should cost the player more to have a mount in the form of tackle and hitch compared to the benefit or buffs the mount gives the player.

    • By this I mean a player can have any mount, provided the player has a saddle with which to tame a mount and a hitch with which to direct the mount.
    • The saddle and hitch are crafted and the player needs a skill check to tame a beast.
    • Once tamed the beast will eat from the players food and drink stores
    • Any speed buff will be minor but some beasts may be better or faster in some areas than another even though they are slower.
    • a tamed beast provides 2-4-6 extra storage slots depending on the beast and its nature (more storage, less speed kind of thing)
    • Crafted hitch/bridle is harder to make than a saddle. The hitch provides control over the tamed beast based on skill check (Beast turns, eventually or beast turns, now. Beast doesnt stop to nibble at purple flowers all the time) 

    I imagine mounts as temporary, unless the player decided to maintain the cost of the mount in the form of stabling it or hitching it when not in use. 

    • The saddle will be a 3 slot container, one to hold the hitch, and two for food and drink. The player mounts when the saddle is "placed" on the beast provided a skill check is satisfied.
    • some dungeons and towns will have hitching posts where the beast can be hitched. Towns will also charge a stabling fee that includes food and water but the saddle remains on the beast. Rural dungeon entrances will have the risk of the mount becoming unhitched and wandering off, where the players saddle will either be on the ground (bound to player) or magically shuttled into their bags.

    I imagine different mounts available in different zones/regions

    • Each race will have affinity to tame certain beasts, but all races have the potential to tame any beast labeled as tameable provided their skill level is high.
    • This also allows a bit of wow factor in a player can ride into town on a strange beast
    • the higher the crafted saddle +hitch skill, the more ornate barding as appears on the beast once mounted
    • The higher the tame skill, the more exotic beast can be tamed
    • every zone or regions will have only certain beasts that can be tamed.

    I imagine mounts prone to reverting back to feral state.

    • If attacked the player is automatically dismounted
    • If a player is dismounted from a tamed beast the player will have a certain amount of time to re-saddle the beast otherwise the beast reverts back to its feral state.
    • If the beast is from another region, the beast will make a bee-line to run to zone and vanish (having run back to its original zone/area) and the player loses the mount if they cannot re-tame in time
    • A player can hitch the beast at certain areas. This will allow the beast to remain tamed untill the player remounts  it provided the player leaves enough provender for the beast in the saddle bags player

    I imagine each beast having unique intuitively understood properties like;tortoises better on arid dessert, lions can jump, boars will naturally stop and face an enemy, wolves are fast but can only bear up to a certain weight.

     

     

    • 768 posts
    April 8, 2019 11:51 AM PDT

    I'll have a short summary of my thoughts on this subject. For those who want to read more; https://www.pantheoncrafters.com/threads/crafters-roundtable-tack-and-harness.273/

    1. Yes mounts should be able to get boosts by products made by crafters.

    2. Rent mounts, and very few or no owned mounts.

    3. No taming various kinds, one unique mount per starting zone is nice enough if any.

    4. Different mounts for different climates and thus different products to mitigate the climate's influences.

    5. Specific harvesting mounts can carry specific harvested resources and when they've reached their max capacity, they'll return to the stable to be offloaded. The harvester can retreive their goods at their leasure there.

    6. Different flavour mount appearance for different crafters. Similar to different mounts for different races/classes. This could be appearance or have more functional elements.

    7. Prestige crafting mounts that are a requirement to acces certain content. (No i'm not talking flying mounts.)

    8. In the long run, portable shops that require specific mounts to carry this shop could be an option. Lower travelspeed and possible risks to be countered ofc.

    • 168 posts
    April 9, 2019 10:20 AM PDT

    Crafters should be deeply involved in most facets of the game. You want to enhance community interaction? If yes, make all sorts of items as NPC rare. Just do not stock NPCs with things like tack and saddles, make the community buy from a crafter vs an NPC. I am neutral on the idea of saddles as a means of speed increases or bag space. I guess I saw it in ESO and it wasn't an overly impressive system to me, it was more of a Mehh thing. Maybe this was yet another case of a good idea with less than stellar game implementation, I don't know.

    I would support the idea of Raising horse breeds/stables after housing is implemented as well as raising foods/garden plots. This also is an idea that would increase interactions between members of the community. If renting is the norm vs owning a mount, then have the community shop at the stables for a rental horse, make housing the only location with stables. This nullifies a particularilly lame (IMO) arguement of the anti-housing crowd that "nobody sees your house but you". Yes, there is a theme of mine that crafting and housing should be intertwined in such a way that housing adds something to the crafting side of the game and vice versa.